The impact of virtual mirroring on customer satisfaction

We investigate the impact of a novel method called "virtual mirroring" to promote employee self-reflection and impact customer satisfaction. The method is based on measuring communication patterns, through social network and semantic analysis, and mirroring them back to the individual. Our goal is to demonstrate that self-reflection can trigger a change in communication behaviors, which lead to increased customer satisfaction. We illustrate and test our approach analyzing e-mails of a large global services company by comparing changes in customer satisfaction associated with team leaders exposed to virtual mirroring (the experimental group). We find an increase in customer satisfaction in the experimental group and a decrease in the control group (team leaders not involved in the virtual mirroring process). With regard to the individual communication indicators, we find that customer satisfaction is higher when employees are more responsive, use a simpler language, are embedded in less centralized communication networks, and show more stable leadership patterns.

Forecasting managerial turnover through e-mail based social network analysis

In this study we propose a method based on e-mail social network analysis to compare the communication behavior of managers who voluntarily quit their job and managers who decide to stay. Collecting 18 months of e-mail, we analyzed the communication behavior of 866 managers, out of which 111 left a large global service company. We compared differences in communication patterns by computing social network metrics, such as betweenness and closeness centrality, and content analysis indicators, such as emotionality and complexity of the language used. To study the emergence of managers' disengagement, we made a distinction based on the period of e-mail data examined. We observed communications during months 5 and 4 before managers left, and found significant variations in both their network structure and use of language. Results indicate that on average managers who quit had lower closeness centrality and less engaged conversations. In addition, managers who chose to quit tended to shift their communication behavior starting from 5 months before leaving, by increasing their degree and closeness centrality, the complexity of their language, as well as their oscillations in betweenness centrality and the number of "nudges" they need to send to peers before getting an answer.